FACT CHECK: Rep. Braun’s latest ad about his business fails to mention its long history of poor worker treatment

INDIANAPOLIS – Rep. Braun’s latest ad tries to hide the truth about his business record, but the facts about his horrible treatment of workers speak for themselves.

The new ad from Rep. Braun is an attempt to cover for his long rap sheet of poor worker treatment, including lawsuits and hundreds of violations that allege he fails to pay employees what they’ve earned, denies them breaks and forces them to work dangerously long hours. A report from the Associated Press in May exposed blistering details of Braun’s history of poor worker treatment; one employee was fired and had his health insurance taken away while recovering from heart surgery because Meyer deemed him not healthy enough to work.

Rep. Braun brags about “better paychecks” for employees, but he fails to mention that Meyer has been repeatedly sued by its employees for underpaying or withholding their pay. In fact, Rep. Braun’s business was cited more than two dozen times in a two year span alone by the U.S. Department of Labor for failure to pay employees for overtime work. Meyer had to give nearly $40,000 in back pay to workers at the Jasper facility Rep. Braun drives past in the ad.

The citations Rep. Braun’s business faced for failing to properly pay its employees is more inexcusable because of the size of the company, not less, as Politifact highlighted in its article examining Rep. Braun’s business. “The larger the company, the more unforgivable it is that they didn’t pay their workers,” Kate Bronfenbrenner, the Director of Labor Education Research at Cornell University, told Politifact in May.

Even when Rep. Braun does follow the law in terms of paying his employees, the pay is still much less than he pretends. Rep. Braun claims in the ad that Meyer pays “nearly double the minimum wage;” however, numerous jobs listed on Meyer’s website advertise wages between $11 or $12 an hour, well under the $14.50 he would be claiming he pays.

“Hoosiers know that Rep. Braun’s business history is one of lawsuits, violations, and putting his own wallet before the wellbeing of his employees. His attempt to distort the facts makes clear he knows just how much of a liability his woeful treatment of workers is on the campaign trail,” said Michael Feldman, spokesman for the Indiana Democratic Party. “If Rep. Braun wants to talk about ‘our responsibility to each other,’ where was that responsibility when he was withholding his employees’ pay or firing them because they needed to recover from heart surgery?”